Tag: Yom Kippur

How does one remove sin and guarantee one’s name in the Book of Life during the Ten Days of Repentance? Here’s one way that does not work: Take a factory-farmed white hen out of a battery cage in the sweltering heat, wave it over your head, say “This is my exchange, this is my...

Israel is a Jewish and Democratic state. Most of the year, this definition is complicated and disrupting, but during a few weeks every year – it is beautifully simple and unifying all religious streams on the Judaism scale. It happens during the Hebrew month of Tishrei, when we...

In sharp contrast to the upcoming New Year celebration of 2015, where people party as if they will live forever, and dance to music focused around the “booty,” the Jewish New Year is a simulated near death experience, it’s focus the soul.

At birth we start with a cry. Our grand entrance is with closed fists and our exit with open hands. We circumcise our newborn males. Life is an exercise in humility. Our hearts are shattered again and again as God seeks our...

It is another one of those nights! I woke up after 4 hours of sleep and could not go back to sleep. My mind started racing and I just now figured out why: I am in the middle of my Inventory for Yom Kippur. I have a form that looks at how I take actions that...

On Rosh Hashanah, it is written and Yom Kippur, it is sealed; who shall live, who shall die. But repentance, prayer and charity avert the severity of the decree. If you apply a literal reading to this most famous of High Holiday prayers, you cannot help but conclude that it is...

Well, we’ve reached the point of summer when we can’t believe that people are starting to talk about the High Holidays. As the daylight begins to shorten, members of the Beit T’Shuvah community are beginning their own preparations.

Please, please don’t say ‘but.’ The words after ‘but’ invalidate everything that comes before – “He’s a nice person, but he does steal from the company.” You see? “But” is a meaning duster, sweeping all that precedes it.

Word went out from the congregation that a longtime member was nearing the end of her life. She has no partner and no children, but, on the day after Yom Kippur, 17 friends from the congregation came to visit her, including current and former clergy, and grown children she used to...

Tradition tells us that the Gates of Repentance stay open until the end of Sukkot. The intensity of Yom Kippur has diminished, but we still remember the hours together, knocking on our hearts, trying to do spiritual CPR, to wake us up to the truth of our lives. On Yom Kippur, we...

Israel- a Jewish and Democratic state. Most of the year, this definition is complicated and disrupting, but during a few weeks every year – it is beautifully simple and unifying. It happens during the Hebrew month of Tishrei, when we mention Rosh Hashannah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot. ...

Yom Kippur last year was a mad rush. I went to services in the morning, dashed off to a retirement home to do a service for them, rushed over to the civic center to listen to a Q&A with Rabbi Doug Kahn of the JCRC followed by afternoon and concluding services, then to a restaurant...

On Sunday, my wife and I drove out to the Valley to buy a new sukkah. It was time. I’d bought our old sukkah from an Armenian Catholic who supplied booths to vendors in farmers’ markets. When his orders began to spike in September, he realized he could have a good little side...

Just hours before Kol Nidre, more than 100 chickens intended to be used for kaporot ceremonies won a reprieve. Kaporot, which means “Atonement,” is a 1,000-year-old custom observed by some Orthodox Jews between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in which an individual swings a live...

While many of us are finding this year’s Yom Kippur conveniently scheduled because it falls on the weekend, at Texas A&M the holiday clashes with one of the most significant days on the football calendar: Aggies vs. Alabama. The Wall Street Journal reports:

In a time when fasting can be a political statement or a fitness trend, you might wonder about its enduring value as a spiritual ritual. To learn more, we asked people who fast on Yom Kippur what they get out of it. Our modest sample yielded folks who are interested only in a...

In addition to his vast experience as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst treating survivors of childhood and adult trauma, Dr. Stephen Marmer is known by many of his patients as someone who has a positive view of the role religion can play in one’s psyche and happiness.

Every year on Yom Kippur, Jews in synagogues all over the world engage in a communal chest-beating during the Vidui, to repent, symbolically, for our collective sins. But what about the sin of being too hard on ourselves? As the High Holy Days approach once again, it seems logical...

Sign up for our newsletter

Email Newsletter Sign Up

Don’t miss any of the latest news and events!
Get the Jewish Journal in your inbox.

JewishJournal.com is produced by TRIBE Media Corp., a non-profit media company whose mission is to inform, connect and enlighten community
through independent journalism. TRIBE Media produces the 150,000-reader print weekly Jewish Journal in Los Angeles – the largest Jewish print
weekly in the West – and the monthly glossy Tribe magazine (TribeJournal.com). Please support us by clicking here.